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For the Birds

By John Andrews

The Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Brown County is among the world’s most important waterfowl habitats.

On a calm summer’s morning at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, visitors are immersed in the sights and sounds of nature. The sun’s rays peek through early clouds and reflect brightly off the water’s shimmering surface. A light breeze rustles the waist-high grasses. The water moves, but so slowly that it can’t even be heard lapping against the shore. Ducks float among the cattails. A single white gull glides into a cornfield.

This outdoors heaven was in jeopardy a century ago. Wildlife was disappearing as water slowly vanished from the marshland. But thanks to the labor of a future governor, the political skills of a former governor and about 200 men who were glad for any job they could find during the Depression, Sand Lake rejuvenated into one of the most important havens in the world for waterfowl.

The refuge encompasses both Sand and Mud Lake — created by dams built along the James River north of Columbia and northwest of Houghton in Brown County — and the surrounding wetlands. Its 21,498 acres are home to more than 260 bird species, 40 mammal species and a variety of fish, reptiles and amphibians.

Perhaps the best way to observe them is a slow journey along the refuge’s auto tour route, a 15-mile gravel path open generally from April 1 through mid-October, that begins at the visitors center and follows nearly the entire perimeter of Sand Lake. A brochure indicates 12 stops along the way, but traffic was light on the day of our visit so we could stop and go as we pleased.

Almost immediately, we spotted a whitetail deer ambling through the grass. A little farther down the road a white egret stood out against the deep, blue water and tall, green reeds. As the path crossed Houghton Dam, pelicans bobbed near the bridge, sporadically dipping their heads under water in search of fish.

Sand Lake attracts nearly 75,000 visitors each year. Most of them spend just a few hours marveling at its natural wonders. Maybe they imagine what it might be like to live in such a beautiful place, surrounded by diverse flora and fauna. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin doesn’t have to imagine. South Dakota’s former congresswoman and current president of Augustana University in Sioux Falls grew up with Sand Lake in her backyard.

Sand Lake is home to more than 200 species of waterfowl, including a white egret standing among the rushes.

Her great-grandparents, Lars and Oline Herseth, homesteaded on land about 3 miles southwest of Houghton on the east side of Sand Lake in 1886. The home in which Herseth Sandlin grew up was built in 1909 and features a large picture window facing west toward the water. She remembers watching thunderheads build on the horizon and millions of snow geese blanketing the water in white during the spring migration.”The refuge was a very special part of my upbringing,” Herseth Sandlin says.”We usually had Easter at our house because it’s the family homestead. After the Easter meal, everyone would load up in their cars and take a drive through the refuge so we could spot different birds. My grandmother in particular was a bit of a birder, and that was passed along to all of her kids. I think those of us who grew up on the farm took it for granted. Our cousins who came from Pierre and Northfield, Minnesota, maybe didn’t take it for granted quite so much.”

The Sand Lake area that Lars and Oline Herseth knew changed dramatically thanks to their son Ralph, who was born in 1909 — right about the time that people began to take waterfowl depletion on the Northern Plains seriously. The federal government had issued wildlife protections as early as 1864. Fish, sea birds, bison and elk all benefited through the creation of reserves. Migratory birds became the focus with the Migratory Bird Act of 1913 and subsequent Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916, an agreement between the United States and Great Britain (on behalf of Canada) designed to protect birds that crossed the international boundary.

Numbers did recover, but it soon became evident that sustained success could only be achieved through habitat protection. Those efforts occupied Congress for much of the 1920s, beginning with a bill introduced in 1921 that sought to create refuges funded through sales of a $1 migratory bird hunting license. That measure was defeated. Another bill surfaced in 1924 and appeared destined for a similar fate when its primary sponsor lost his bid for re-election.

That’s when Peter Norbeck got involved. South Dakota’s senator and former governor was a noted conservationist who worked to grow Custer State Park. He became the Migratory Bird Conservation Act’s new champion and immediately encountered resistance, primarily from Sen. James Reed of Missouri. Reed objected to the license fee, opposed the bill’s provision to hire additional federal game wardens to enforce its provisions, and sarcastically said that it would make just as much sense to create sanctuaries for jackrabbits.”To Congress, the whole bird conservation matter is a joke,” Norbeck lamented.

Pelicans float in a cove near the Houghton Dam, the earthwork that separates Sand Lake from Mud Lake.

Norbeck lost that round, but he returned with another bill in 1927. It retained the $1 federal hunting license, which Norbeck believed would generate $1 million annually for land purchases and law enforcement, and the creation of public hunting grounds adjacent to the refuges. Senators fought, but Norbeck ultimately succeeded in passing a somewhat weakened version of the bill. The steady revenue source had been replaced by an annual congressional appropriation, which came in fits and starts. Lawmakers approved just half the money Norbeck sought over the next four years. Still, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act led to the creation of 22 refuges encompassing more than 1 million acres by 1933.

In South Dakota, experts pointed to marshy Sand Lake as an ideal location. Families, including the Herseths, donated land to help make the refuge a reality. And who better to lead the effort than the young man who grew up on its eastern shore?

Ralph Herseth was the 26-year-old supervisor of the Sand Lake Civilian Conservation Corps camp. When Sand Lake was officially added to the national refuge system in 1935, he and his 200 men got to work building dams, digging ditches and planting the uplands to provide food and cover. They moved 120,000 cubic yards of dirt to build eight islands and planted thousands of trees and shrubs. The men also constructed a 108-foot-tall steel observation tower that visitors can still climb. It provides a beautiful, panoramic view of the refuge, though the ascent is not for everyone.”You look around and it’s a nice view, but if it’s a windy day there’s something about being up there and feeling it sway,” Herseth Sandlin says.”We took my husband out there when we were dating, the first time he came to visit the farm. I don’t know that he wanted to stay up there too long, and he hasn’t asked to go back up.”

South Dakota ultimately became home to six national wildlife refuges, all managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Sand Lake, Waubay, Karl Mundt, Lake Andes, Lacreek and Bear Butte (managed as part of Lacreek). Each refuge boasts its own claim to wildlife fame. Bald eagles draw visitors to the Mundt Refuge along the Missouri River, trumpeter swans spend part of the year at Lacreek near Martin, and Sand Lake is home to the world’s largest breeding colony of Franklin’s gulls. Sand Lake has been designated a Globally Important Birding Area and was recognized by the American Bird Conservancy as one of the top 15 birding sites in North America.

After Sand Lake’s completion, the Herseth family enjoyed its benefits. Ralph and his wife, Lorna, hosted family and friends for hunting excursions on their land adjoining the refuge. A lifelong advocate of natural resources, Ralph Herseth brought those principles to Pierre when he served as governor from 1959 to 1961. Among his achievements was passage of the South Dakota Conservancy Law, the first step in the proposed Oahe Irrigation Project, because, he noted,”water was more precious than oil.”

Hands-on exhibits inside the Sand Lake visitors center help children learn about its variety of wildlife.

Meanwhile, Sand Lake became a playground for Herseth children. Herseth Sandlin and her brother often explored the refuge on foot or by three-wheeler. One winter, her father, Lars, bought a contraption that resembled a sailboat on ice skates that the family used to glide across the frozen pond.

It also offered early lessons in profits and losses. When Herseth Sandlin was 9, her father suggested she raise pheasants. The refuge offered $1 for every chick raised to maturity, banded and released within its borders. She began with 100 chicks, but barn cats took around 30 of them.

She tried again the next year, this time with 200 chicks. She built sturdy chicken wire fencing and eventually had nearly 200 fully healthy ringneck pheasants.”I banded them, put them out in the refuge and two days later we had the 1981 hail storm, and I’m not sure any of them survived,” she says.”But I still got my payment.”

If you’re traveling Highway 10, consider veering off at Sand Lake and spending an hour or two among the solitude. Let the grasses sway around you. Listen for the distinct song of meadowlarks. Look for the bright blue bills of ruddy ducks or the red faces and white rings of pheasants (maybe the Augie president’s birds weren’t doomed). All in all, Sand Lake provides a welcome respite for man and bird alike.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Eight Over Seven … In One

By John Andrews

Photography by Paul Horsted

Rapid City’s Erick Sykora biked, hiked and ran up the Black Hills’ eight tallest peaks in a single day.

Black Hills adventurers sensed a challenge in the summer of 2017, when Seth Tupper published a series of articles called”Eight over Seven,” which featured the eight mountains in the Black Hills that stand 7,000 feet or taller. Hikers, bikers and runners set out to conquer each one. Many of them blogged about their adventures through the summer and fall.

Erick Sykora considered it a bit more ambitiously.”I looked at where these were placed and started thinking maybe you could do it in a day,” he says.

Only one other group of hikers is known to have accomplished the feat, traveling from peak to peak by car. Sykora wanted to use nothing but his own manpower. The prospect might intimidate many a day hiker, but Sykora is an avid cyclist and runner with several triathlons, half marathons and mountain bike races under his belt. Still, many factors — including weather, health, access to food and water — would have to fall into place. And, as it turned out, he’d need a little luck.

Sykora began studying U.S. Forest Service maps as well as Google maps and smartphone apps to set his best course of action. He decided on a path that followed roughly a crescent shape through the central Hills beginning at Terry Peak southwest of Lead and proceeding to Crooks Tower, Crows Nest Peak, Green Mountain, Odakota Mountain, Bear Mountain and Sylvan Peak before ending at Black Elk Peak, the tallest point in South Dakota.”I knew I was going to go north to south just because the elevation gain made more sense to do it that way,” he says.”Only a few, like Bear Mountain and Odakota Mountain, did I have to really think about because there aren’t a lot of roads through there. But you can kind of connect the dots if you look at it on a map, so I figured that would be the best way to do it.”

With a route in place, he focused on each peak. He created a spreadsheet that planned every mile and every minute. He identified the best spots to begin his ascent and how far he’d be able to ride his bike before ditching it in the woods for his running shoes and picking it up again on the way down. There were also notes for his parents, Barry and Sonia, who followed in their pickup with food, water and any other support Sykora might need.

So after almost eight months of planning, Sykora, who works as a lumber broker for Forest Products Distributors in Rapid City, arrived at the base of Terry Peak at 5 a.m. on the morning of July 7, 2018. Roughly 15 hours later, he finished the remarkable journey with a sandwich and a cold beer at the base of Black Elk Peak. He’d bicycled about 100 miles (both in ascending or descending several of the mountains and over the road traveling from peak to peak) and hiked or run about 15 miles.”There was just this huge sense of accomplishment,” Sykora says.”We sort of sat around and reflected on the day. I was happy for my mom and dad too, because they’d gotten to go into really remote places and see things that not many people get to see. There was no point during the day where something happened and I thought, ‘This is not good.’ It all ran smoothly. We felt really good.”

Here are the Black Hills'”Eight Over Seven,” in the order in which Sykora climbed each one, and some observations from his journey.

Terry Peak

7,064 feet

Lawrence County

6 miles southwest of Lead

Most South Dakotans know Terry Peak as one of the prime skiing locations in the state. Members of the Bald Mountain Ski Club set out to make it so in 1938, when they installed a rope tow up Stewart Slope on land donated by Bertha Stewart. Today Terry Peak boasts more than 25 trails and 600 skiable acres. Before that, the mountain had been named for Alfred Howe Terry, a Union general during the Civil War and military commander of Dakota Territory from 1866 to 1869 and again from 1872 to 1886.

Terry Peak was one of two mountains (along with Black Elk Peak) that Sykora had previously climbed, so he had an idea what to expect. He knew the only bikeable portion would be the descent, so he threw his two-wheeler over his shoulder and followed the chair lift up Stewart Slope to the summit, which affords a vast view of the Hills to the south and, to the west, Spearfish Canyon, where low, early morning clouds had seeped into the valley.”It almost looked like someone had poured milk into Spearfish Canyon,” he says.”It was really cool.”

Crooks Tower

7,137 feet

Lawrence County

17 miles northwest of Rochford

Sykora pedaled the 28 miles to Crooks Tower along the Mickelson Trail and a network of local roads. The path to the top was too rugged for biking, so he ran up and down.

The name Crooks Tower is a misnomer since no tower actually exists at the top. It’s the highest spot in Lawrence County, and for a brief period was thought to be the highest point in the Black Hills. In the spring and summer of 1875, Lt. Col. Richard Irving Dodge escorted Walter P. Jenney as the geologist investigated rumors that Gen. George Armstrong Custer had discovered gold in the Black Hills in 1874. Dodge and his men ascended the great limestone plateau and named it Crook’s Mountain in honor of Gen. George Crook, a former Civil War soldier then serving as head of the Department of the Platte with headquarters at Fort Omaha. Crook is perhaps most well-known in South Dakota history as the commander of U.S. forces at the Battle of Slim Buttes in September of 1876.

Dodge estimated Crook’s Mountain at 7,600 feet, 160 feet taller than Harney (now Black Elk) Peak. Four years later, another published report indicated that Harney was actually the tallest and Crook’s Mountain was second. Today, it comes in fifth.

Because there is no distinguishing promontory, the summit can be tough to find. There is a cairn (a pile of rocks that hikers often build to indicate the summit) situated on a ledge, but the true peak lies just beyond that.”That was probably one of the cooler places,” Sykora says.”It was still early in the morning and we saw elk.”

Crows Nest Peak

7,048 feet

Pennington County

8 miles northwest of Deerfield

Finding the summit at Crows Nest Peak proved to be the most challenging. After approaching the secluded mountain by bicycle on a gravel road Sykora discovered no trail, so his ascent was a mix of hiking and running through grass and trees toward a hill that he believed to be the top. But as he got closer, he realized he was wrong.”I ended up going off the backside of it and found something that looked a little higher than the last mound. I was kind of giving up, but then I remembered Seth Tupper’s stories from the Rapid City Journal that talked about following a fence line, and I came across the geographical survey marker at the top. So I had a little bit of luck on my side in finding that. Standing on top, I couldn’t see at all. I was in the middle of a forest.”

Legend says the mountain’s name can be traced to a band of Crow Indians who were camped on the summit when a warring tribe established attack lines on three sides. The fourth side proved too rugged for the Crows to escape or the opposing tribe to attack. In the darkness of night, the Crows killed their horses and fashioned ropes from the horse hide, which they used to scale down the fourth side.

Green Mountain

7,164 feet

Pennington County

16 miles northwest of Custer

Green Mountain is a favorite destination for snowmobilers, who follow a trail to the summit to a spot called the Clinton Overlook. This path allowed Sykora to bike all the way to the top, which is nothing more than a knob in a limestone ridge.”This one sat out on top of a cliff line and had really cool views. You could see pretty much everything looking to the east.”

Green Mountain was nameless until 1982, when the Black Hills National Forest petitioned the U.S. Board of Geographic Names to call it Green Mountain. Wayne and Lewis Compton, both U.S. Forest Service employees who had lived in the area for nearly 50 years, reported that the peak had always been known locally as Green Mountain simply because it’s largely covered in grass.

Odakota Mountain

7,206 feet

Pennington County

9 miles west of Hill City

Sykora got a good look at Odakota Mountain, the second highest spot in the Black Hills, because it rises just on the other side of Six Mile Road across from Green Mountain. He bicycled along Long Draw Road, but scrambled the last half mile or so to the top. The summit is marked with a 3 1/4-inch aluminum disk affixed to a 30-inch long iron pipe and set in a 10-inch concrete pad. Jerry Penry, a licensed surveyor in Nebraska and South Dakota, and Black Hills historian and photographer Paul Horsted placed the marker in the summer of 2019 after conducting what they believe to be the first precise survey ever done of Odakota. According to their calculations, Odakota actually stands 7,198 feet tall.

In May of 1968, Harold and Loretta Bradfelt bought a ranch in the Black Hills west of Hill City that included one of the tallest peaks in the Hills. It had no name, so Loretta wrote to Sen. Karl Mundt seeking to have the place named Odakota Mountain, using the indigenous word meaning”establishment of peace.” Mundt followed the appropriate bureaucratic chain and the U.S. Board of Geographic Names approved the designation in 1969.

Bear Mountain

7,166 feet

Pennington County

10 miles northwest of Custer

ìBear Mountain is going to suck,” Sykora wrote in his spreadsheet notes, and it was every bit the challenge he expected.”I knew it would be difficult because I dropped in elevation quite a bit from Odakota and the access was from the east along a four-wheeler trail, which was a steep elevation gain, almost straight up.”

A combination of bike riding and hiking brought him to the top, where a steel fire tower provides rangers with an extensive view of the central Black Hills.”The closer you get to the central Hills, these mountains get a little more prominent, and there’s more elevation gain,” Sykora says.”You could see all the way north to Terry Peak, you could see Black Elk Peak, all the way into Wyoming.”

Sylvan Peak

7,000 feet

Custer County

5 miles northeast of Custer

For the first time, Sykora strayed from his planned route. Instead of Medicine Mountain Road and Reno Gulch Road, he took Spring Creek Road, which wound through a peaceful canyon before meeting Highway 385 between Hill City and Custer.”I’d never been back there before. It was a deep canyon, perfect gravel road, little bit of a tailwind. It was a perfect time of the day and I felt really good there. I was flying and felt really strong.”

Traffic along the highways and at Sylvan Lake was busy with tourists, but few people make the hike up Sylvan Peak. Though it’s only about a mile and half to the summit, there is no dedicated trail and downed timber is strewn all over the hillside.”It was constant hopping from dead tree to dead tree to rocks. It was really hard because there was no smooth trail or even a meadow to walk in. It was just pure downed timber.”

Another false summit tricked him momentarily, but he found his way to the true peak, which offered a view of the backside of Crazy Horse Monument, Black Elk Peak (just 4 miles to the east) and Terry Peak.

Black Elk Peak

7,242 feet

Pennington County

5 miles southeast of Hill City

It may seem counterintuitive to leave the highest mountain in the Black Hills until last, but Black Elk Peak may be the easiest climb of the eight. A well-worn and fairly simple path leads hundreds of hikers every year from the trailhead at Sylvan Lake to the stone fire lookout tower built by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1939. For decades, South Dakota’s highest spot was called Harney Peak for Gen. William Harney, a military commander stationed in the Black Hills in the 1870s. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names approved the change to Black Elk Peak in 2016, to honor Lakota holy man Black Elk, whose vision quest to the mountain’s summit was recounted in John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks.

Sykora says he had planned to run the trail but hiked instead. An IT band issue had been causing him some pain in his leg. But after climbing seven of the Black Hills’ eight highest peaks already, he was due a more leisurely stroll.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

©Paul Horsted/paulhorsted.com
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In Search of the Fairburn Agate

By John Andrews

Fairburn agates can be found in several locations in southwestern South Dakota, but the most popular spot might be the Kern agate beds east of Fairburn.

It was barely past 9 a.m. and sweat already soaked our shirts. The forecast called for highs in the 90s, but as the sun baked the hardened gumbo and reflected off rocks strewn throughout the Kern agate beds east of Fairburn we could feel the midday heat about six hours early.

We had met Don Bahr, a retired law enforcement officer and rock hound, in Rapid City at 7:30 that morning and headed south toward Fairburn in search of Fairburn agates, perhaps the most sought after gemstone in South Dakota.”I can’t guarantee anything,” Bahr had cautioned us several times in the preceding months as we planned our trip, knowing that people have spent days scraping and turning rocks only to leave with nothing. We told him that we understood; we didn’t really expect to find anything. We just wanted an inside look at this rare and valuable gem that beckons to rock hounds far and wide, who venture far off the beaten path hoping to find a Fairburn — or even a piece of a Fairburn — even though at the end of the day all they have are a backache and a sweat-soaked shirt.

***

Fairburn Agates hold a curious power over collectors who scour the Black Hills and Badlands for them. Various types of agates — colorful gemstones formed millions of years ago inside sedimentary rock — are found all around the world. The Lake Superior Agate, found along the shores of its namesake lake, is highly prized in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Even in western South Dakota, rock hounds discover water agates, lace agates, bubble gum agates, prairie agates and several other varieties that feature interesting shapes and patterns inside. But the Fairburn remains elusive and highly prized. It is only found in the Black Hills and surrounding badlands and grasslands of southwest South Dakota and northwest Nebraska. Its outer shell — often a chocolate or sandy brown coating called the matrix — is not necessarily impressive, but its bright, concentric inner rings of red, orange, yellow, pink, blue, green or even black and incredibly tight banding can be mesmerizing. They are unlike any other gem on earth; collectors pay hundreds of dollars (and sometimes more than $1,000) for particularly good specimens.

Fairburn agates, the official state gemstone of South Dakota, are recognizable by their bright colors and tight banding. Photo by Thomas P. Shearer.

Roger Clark was already a rock hound, but on a trip to the Badlands in the early 1970s he bought a book called Midwest Gem Trails by June Culp Zeitner, one of South Dakota’s pre-eminent amateur geologists and rock hounds. That’s how Clark, a lawyer practicing in Appleton, Wisconsin, discovered Fairburn agates. He knew immediately that he had to find one.

“It was kind of like a small, obsessive compulsive disorder,” he says with a chuckle.”And the longer it went on, the more the obsession grew.”

Three to five times a year, Clark made time for hunting trips to South Dakota.”I was so obsessed that I would leave work on Wednesday afternoon and drive to Sioux Falls. I’d get up in the morning and I could be out in the Badlands that afternoon. I could hunt for two days, and then I’d drive 14 hours back and go to work on Monday. It’s ridiculous to talk about it now, but you just get obsessed with these things.”

He searched for two years and never found a Fairburn. Then he met Art and Ann Bruce, veteran rock hunters from Hot Springs who were nearly 80 but still quite active. The Bruces agreed to take Clark and his wife, Mary Jane, to the agate beds and teach them. One day, on a trip to the Nebraska grasslands just south of Ardmore, Clark found his first Fairburn.”It was just happenstance,” he says.”I just happened to turn over the right rock.”

Today, Clark has around 1,000 Fairburn agates in his collection, and he’s bought and sold many more. But his first agate remains on a shelf in his home office.”It’s red, and then clear, and then pink. Those are the predominant colors. It’s not a spectacular agate, but it’s just one of those moments that you remember.”

***

Not much was known about Fairburn agates when Clark started hunting them. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1930s and 1940s that interest in Fairburn agates began to sweep across the rock collecting community.”The longer I went on, the more I realized that I had to figure out where these things came from,” he says.”They don’t just appear in the Badlands. It didn’t make sense to me that nobody had followed that geologic course to find out where they originated.”

June Culp Zeitner was among the first to write extensively about Fairburns. Zeitner was born in Michigan in 1916, but her family eventually settled in Aberdeen. She graduated from Northern State University and took a job teaching in Mission, on the Rosebud Reservation. That’s where she met Albert Zeitner, whose family ran a hardware store and oversaw a small museum and rock shop. The two became acquainted, and for their first date Zeitner drove them to a remote location in the Badlands. He stopped the car, got out and disappeared over a hill. Soon she heard him shouting,”Fairburn! Fairburn!” She thought some sort of accident had befallen him and he was being burned, but her beau had actually found an agate. The experience not only created a memorable first date, but it launched June on a completely new trajectory and introduced her to a hobby that occupied much of her life.

The Zeitners traveled throughout North America from the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring mines and learning about the rocks and minerals they found. June wrote several books, more than 1,000 magazine articles and served as an assistant editor of Lapidary Journal, a periodical devoted to mineralogy. Perhaps her most important book, the one Clark bought on his trip to the Badlands, was Midwest Gem Trails, a field guide for rock and fossil hunters originally published in 1964.

Zeitner also created the State Stone Program, which allows each state to select an official state gem, fossil, mineral or rock. The South Dakota legislature officially designated the Fairburn agate as its state gemstone in 1966. When Zeitner died in Rapid City in 2009 at the age of 93, she was known far and wide as the First Lady of Gems.

During the decades Zeitner was writing about Fairburn agates, several theories explained their origin. Some people thought they had formed through ancient volcanic activity in the Badlands. Others proposed they had been eroded and somehow swept east when the Rocky Mountains formed.

A wrinkle in those ideas came when agates that looked almost exactly like Fairburns were discovered in Teepee Canyon, about 14 miles west of Custer and nearly 60 miles from the agate beds east of Fairburn. They appeared to be emerging from a layer of limestone, and they had the same bright patterns and banding as the Badlands agates. Zeitner suggested that maybe they were related, and even that Fairburn agates could have originated in the Black Hills. But other longtime collectors, including the Bruces of Hot Springs, refused to acknowledge any possible connection between Teepee Canyon agates and Fairburn agates.

Clark immersed himself in this world of conflicting theories. He studied Zeitner and the writings of other scholars and rock hounds and compared them with his own experience in the field. By 1998, he’d accumulated enough knowledge to present his own Fairburn agate origin story in a book called South Dakota’s Fairburn Agate, which includes diagrams and beautiful agate photography by his wife, Mary Jane. It is still available in certain museums and rock shops in the Hills.

His idea coincides with those of several other Black Hills geologists, and has come to be widely accepted. Fairburn agates were created between 250 million and 300 million years ago within the Minnelusa Formation, a layer of limestone that ranges from 75 to 1,300 feet thick and encircles the Black Hills. During the Black Hills uplift, between 35 million and 70 million years ago, around 400 square miles of the Minnelusa Formation was eroded — along with the agates it contained — and swept east into the Badlands. The agates were buried and are now slowly being revealed.

Some agate hunters still drew a firm line between Teepee Canyon agates and Fairburn agates, so Clark’s book was skeptically received. But in August of 2000 the Jasper Fire burned more than 85,000 acres of the Black Hills, including Teepee Canyon.”That location had been hunted for years, but when that fire burned, it burned off 8 or 10 miles of forest north of that Teepee Canyon area,” Clark says.”It was a very hot fire and it burned right down to the dirt. Afterwards, you’d see agates everywhere peeking out at you. That’s when we were really able to nail down the origin as the Minnelusa Formation.”

Exactly how Fairburn agates form remains somewhat mysterious. During the age in which they were created, far western South Dakota lay at the bottom of a vast ocean. Some geologists say that water rich in silica slowly trickled through passageways in the rock, and over time silica accumulated inside tiny pockets, creating an agate. Other compounds in the water, such as iron oxide (red) and manganese oxide (black), created the various colors.

Based on research conducted since the first printing of his book, Clark now believes that agates formed through a replacement process. Those pockets were originally filled with calcite, which dissolved when silica came into contact with it. And there is still debate over what causes the tight banding.”There are things that we still don’t understand,” Clark says.”It’s still a mysterious process. I’m 77 now, and I don’t think I’ll know in my lifetime, but that’s okay.”

***

“It’s like walking on the moon out here,” Bahr said as his gray 4×4 Jeep slowly navigated the heavily rutted path leading to the Kern agate beds.

The beds lie about 14 miles east of Fairburn, a tiny town of fewer than 100 people in Custer County that was settled in 1879. Its name –“Fair,” for pleasant and”burn,” the Scottish term for a stream or brook — is a nod to the winding French Creek, which flows just south of town.

Armed with a three-tined garden rake and a spray bottle of water, Don Bahr searches for elusive Fairburn agates.

We followed French Creek Road, a well maintained gravel route that passes several large ranches. As we turned north just beyond an old 4-H campground, the terrain grew rough. Bahr’s Jeep shook and rattled as we crossed the bone-dry bed of French Creek (“You do see a muffler lying on the ground out here once in a while,” he joked) and began the slight ascent into a landscape that did indeed look otherworldly.

Rocky hills rolled as far as the eye could see, covering thousands of acres. Maps often show the Fairburn agate beds as an elliptical belt stretching from near Creston in Pennington County to Orella in Sioux County, Nebraska. The beds vary in width, but the widest expanse covers about 15 miles near Red Shirt.

As we drove into the hills, we passed vehicles bearing license plates from Wyoming, Minnesota and New York — proof that hunters from near and far are welcome to scour the beds as long as they have the means to get there. That was not always the case.

An old widow that most agate hunters today know only as Grandma Kern may have been among the first people to realize what treasures could be found on her ranch land. Zeitner recounted the story of Jack Zasadil of Hermosa, who went agate hunting for the first time on the Kern ranch sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, only to be chased off by Grandma Kern and her shotgun. But as word spread and more rock hunters began showing up at Grandma Kern’s house, she started following them around the agate beds with coins in her apron pockets, hoping to buy what they found. Her cooperation may have been hastened by her ever-worsening blindness, which meant she could no longer find for herself the agates she grew to love.

Today there is no sign that anyone ever lived in these hills. A visitor might wonder if it would even be possible.

Bahr reminded us to keep our eyes on the ground the moment we stepped out of the Jeep. Fairburn agates aren’t found just on the hillsides. They can be hidden in patches of grass or even lying along the road. It’s also important to watch for rattlesnakes that occasionally come out to sun themselves on the rocky ground.

Our tools for the day were simple: a three-tined garden fork and a spray bottle of water. As we climbed the hills, Bahr scraped his rake through the top layer of rocks.”My theory is that there are all sorts of agates, just beneath the surface, or just barely poking out,” he says.”It’s just a stroke of luck to find one, because they’re not always just lying on the surface.”

Bahr has been a recreational rock hunter for 14 years. His first trip to the Kern beds offered a lesson in perseverance.”When you’re out here, you find these agates that look like Fairburns, but they’re prairie or water agates,” he says.”That first day I thought I was loaded. My pockets were bulging. But I didn’t have a single Fairburn.”

It took some time to learn the telltale attributes of a Fairburn. Now, as we scraped, kicked and dug our way up and down the hills, turning as many rocks as we could, hoping to see the bright colors and banding, Bahr simply said,”If you have to ask if it’s a Fairburn, it’s not.”

Still, we were unsure. Bahr had told us what to look for in the matrix — that brownish-gray outer shell — but the rocks began to look alike.”You could spend a week out here and not find a thing,” he gently reminded us.

He was in the middle of explaining the differences between volcanic and sedimentary agates when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence.”There’s Fairburn right there!” he said, hardly able to disguise his disbelief.

Our Fairburn agate, as we discovered it.

Could it be, that after no more than 20 minutes of searching, we had found what eludes other hunters for days, weeks, months and longer? We crouched to get a closer look, and though we’d never seen a Fairburn agate in person we recognized it immediately. Lying among white quartz, rose quartz, petrified wood and a multitude of other rocks was a tiny stone with blue, brown, yellow and red layers. A few sprays of water accentuated the colors and made the banding appear even more pronounced. It was less than an inch long — most likely a fragment from a much larger agate — but there was no mistaking that it was a Fairburn.

“There could be more right around here,” Bahr said,”but there are stories of people finding a piece like this, and somebody else finds one a mile away, and they fit together.”

We’ll probably never know where the rest of our agate lies. We searched the hills for another 90 minutes but found nothing more.

Do we attribute our discovery to beginner’s luck? Perhaps, but maybe we owed Mother Nature a debt of gratitude, as well. The night before our visit, the area around Fairburn received about an inch of rain, which helped wash away the top layer of rocks, exposing new stones that are slowly but constantly rising to the surface.

When Roger Clark began hunting agates more than 40 years ago, old timers like Art Bruce told him there was no point in visiting the Kern beds.”He was very clear that the agates had all been picked up,” Clark recalls.”They were gone. There was no use looking out in the Badlands anymore. People had just kind of given up. Now we know that it’s just a matter of time. Agates are washing out all the time in the Badlands.”

***

Fairburn agate hunting continues to evolve. Hunters still frequent the Kern beds and other hot spots in the Black Hills and Badlands, but today agates can just as easily be found in the middle of Rapid City. Landscape rock and other fill material often comes from gravel pits along the Cheyenne River. The pits are typically on private land and collectors need permission before exploring them, but the large piles of fresh material have often yielded beautiful agates. We heard of Fairburns being found in the parking lots at Walmart, K-Mart and even the roof of the Custer County jail.

Trade shows are still popular gathering places for rock hounds, but there is also a busy Facebook page called Fairburn Agate Hunter, where more than 2,200 people share their finds and stories.

It’s a passion that not everyone shares, but for those who do, the sweat, dirt and pain are all worth it.”In order to find a Fairburn, you may have to slide onto a cactus as I did,” June Culp Zeitner once wrote.”You may wear holes in your jeans rubbing the dust off stones to look for signs of fortifications. You may stare holes through your glasses. You may let out a yelp at a discarded rattlesnake skin, and get lost in a ravine.

“There’s something about it all that makes a real rockhound consider this fun. He wouldn’t work as hard for anyone for even the best wages, but to do it for fun — that’s different.”

Our hot day in the agate beds was just as she described. The working conditions might not sound good on a job advertisement — heat, isolation, random success and rattlesnakes — but the search gets in your blood.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Chasing Cats

By John Andrews

Illustration by Mike Reagan.

In the spring of 1949, Roy Groves was a 64-year-old grandfather who lived with his wife Alice in a little white house just a short walk from Toby’s Lounge, today a legendary chicken shack in Meckling. He stood just under 6 feet tall, was stocky and had the quiet countenance you might expect from the grandfatherly figure shown in black and white photographs with an old fishing hat perched atop his head.

Groves knew a lot about fishing. Some considered him an expert. In fact, during a remarkable four days in May 1949, he pulled two monstrous catfish out of the James River that proved to be state and world records — a 94-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish and a 55-pound channel catfish.

His blue catfish record stood until September of 1959 when Ed Elliott, an electrician from Vermillion, caught a 97-pounder in the Missouri River. It was surpassed again by current record holder Steve Lemmon of Elk Point, who landed a 99-pound, 4-ounce blue in the Big Sioux River on July 21, 2012. But when Groves died at age 82 in 1967, his channel cat was still the state champion, and it remained so until 2019, when the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks issued a ruling that justified what many anglers had long suspected — that Groves’ channel cat wasn’t really a channel after all. His 70-year-old record was voided.

The decision rankled Groves’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom still live in South Dakota. But it also rekindled interest in the bewhiskered creatures that swim South Dakota’s waters.

***

South Dakota is home to three types of catfish. Channel cats are the most widespread; they live in rivers and lakes throughout the state. Flathead catfish are found primarily in the Missouri River and its tributaries, the James and Big Sioux, but there is also an isolated population in Lake Mitchell. Blue catfish swim almost exclusively in the Missouri below Gavins Point Dam, though they can be caught along the lower James and Big Sioux rivers, as well.

Flathead catfish are one of three species of catfish found in South Dakota. They swim mostly in the Missouri, James and Big Sioux rivers. Photo by Sam Stukel.

Channel cats are easily recognizable by their whiskers, or barbels, that extend from the corners of their mouths. Their bodies are drab olive in color with white bellies and no scales. They lurk close to the bottom of a lake or river, preying on crustaceans, insects or other fish. All in all, a slimy-looking catfish may not be the most attractive species to find on the end of your hook, but according to Geno Adams, the fisheries program administrator for Game, Fish and Parks, they are among the state’s most underutilized fish.”We have some absolutely phenomenal channel cat fishing in South Dakota, and they just don’t get used like they do in some other states,” Adams says.”We’ve always been a walleye-centric state. That’s our number one sport fish. Channel catfish are pretty well dispersed around the country. Walleye are not. But these Missouri River reservoirs are absolutely full of fantastic catfish. When people from other states move here and they’re big cat fishermen, or they come for a walleye trip and get winded off the reservoir and the guide takes them into the back of a bay to fish cats, people are astounded by the quality of catfishing in these reservoirs.”

Biologists are currently studying channel cats and flatheads on the James River from Olivet to its confluence with the Missouri. They hope to learn more about their lifespan and how the populations move and grow. B.J. Schall, a fisheries biologist with Game, Fish and Parks who is helping lead the study, says channel cats can be among the most accessible fish for beginning anglers.”Catfishing can be really inexpensive and really easy to do,” Schall says.”You don’t need the equipment that a lot of anglers use for walleye fishing. You can pull up to a bank, throw out a piece of bait that sinks to the bottom and just let it sit. That makes it a little more low tech than the guys who have depth finder systems and sonars in their boats. And if you can get access to a river system, you can just bump onto the bank and fish. It doesn’t necessarily require a boat.”

Anglers like Jason Stansbury fish for the occasional channel cat, but he’s part of a group that’s passionate about landing trophy flatheads. Flathead catfish stay away from swiftly moving water, opting for deeper pools with plenty of cover. They can live a long time, which allows them to grow to monstrous proportions. Part of the Game, Fish and Parks’ research on the James includes taking spines from a catfish’s pectoral fin, which helps determine age. The oldest flathead they’ve discovered to date was 25 years old, and the largest weighed nearly 48 pounds and measured 44 1/2 inches. But they can get bigger. Davin Holland holds the current state record with a 63-pound, 8-ounce flathead caught in the James River.

Stansbury’s biggest is 56 pounds, caught while fishing from the bank of the Big Sioux.”They’re not like catching walleyes,” says Stansbury, the catfishing expert for Wild Dakota, a popular hunting and fishing television program.”These fish are territorial predators. They’re smart fish. I always say that any size flathead you catch is a win.”

Protection for large flatheads is another reason behind the James River study. Avid catfishermen like Stansbury have long been concerned about the potential overharvest of trophy flatheads because in some places there have been no size limits. Schall says biologists have run some modeling based on their current research that indicates any new regulations are unlikely to result in significant changes in the number of large fish in the system. Still, the Game, Fish and Parks Commission is considering a resolution that would limit anglers to one harvested flathead per day that measures more than 28 inches.

Catfish can be caught from shore, but anglers searching for trophy flatheads and blues often spend the night in boats. Photo by Sam Stukel.

Stansbury caught his 56-pounder in 2019 using a bullhead for bait. The fish bit at around 1 a.m., which is typical given their nocturnal nature. He battled the fish for nearly half an hour before he had it in the net.

Tom Van Kley lives in Sioux Falls and sells insurance for Mutual of Omaha by day, but many nights and weekends find him searching for trophy flatheads and blue cats. He was introduced to catfishing almost by accident.”We were walleye fishing up by Trent,” Van Kley says.”We ended up catching some red horse suckers that we cut for bait, just to see what we could catch. We were sitting by the campfire and our rods just started getting smashed by 8- to 10-pound channel cats. From that night on, catfish just got into my blood.”

Eventually he began looking for even bigger cats, but the transition wasn’t easy.”The first year that I primarily targeted flatheads I didn’t catch one all year long,” he says.”Then finally, on our last trip of the year down in Omaha, I caught two out of the Missouri River. The next year I didn’t catch one until July. But then I went out with a guy who really knew what he was doing and he kind of showed me the ropes. We just smacked them. We caught eight or nine fish that night up to 25 or 30 pounds each, and I never looked back.”

His biggest catch came during a tournament in Sioux City. He was fishing near Dakota Dunes on the lowest stretch of South Dakota’s Missouri River.”We were sitting on this spot that I thought would be pretty good, but it was midnight and we had no fish. And the weigh-in was at 2 a.m. My buddy wanted to call it a night, but I said, ëA lot can change in two hours.’ About 35 minutes later one rod folded and we had a 20-pound fish on.”

They rebaited their hooks and waited. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw another rod bend. He grabbed it and less than 10 minutes later reeled in a 56-pound flathead. They won the tournament with 76 pounds of catfish.”We’re usually fishing from 7 p.m. until the sun comes up,” Van Kley says.”You put in a lot of work to catch a few fish. If you pull in three or four flatheads in a night, you did pretty good. You put a 50-pound fish on the floor and it’s pretty surreal.”

It’s a thrill that Roy Groves knew well.

***

Groves awoke at 5:30 on the morning of Sunday, May 22, 1949. An hour later he was unfolding his chair at one of his favorite fishing spots, about a mile north of where the James River flows into the Missouri just east of Yankton. He cast out two lines — one a 20-pound test line and the other a little heavier — using crawfish and chub minnows for bait.”He cast from the bank into a spot that he was pretty familiar with,” says Marc Rasmussen, a senior vice president at BankWest in Pierre and Groves’ great-grandson.”He knew there had been some fish out there, but he wasn’t having a very good day. He sat there for a long time and only picked up one carp. He kept having his minnows chewed off the line, so he knew something was going on down there, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.”

Groves fished for nearly 12 hours that day. Shortly after 6 p.m., he put his last chub minnow on the 20-pound line and cast it out. Two minutes later,”Wham! It felt like I hooked a submarine,” he later told a local newspaper reporter.

The fish swam about 15 feet before Groves set the hook, but that didn’t faze it. The giant cat took about 100 yards of line off Groves’ reel.”She did what she wanted with the line after that,” Groves recalled.”After a half hour to 45-minute fight, she just dove to bottom and stayed there.”

Roy Groves of Meckling is pictured with his 94-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish (measured by grandson Gary Groves), which set a state record in 1949. It was the second record catfish Groves had caught that week.

Groves grabbed a pair of pliers from his tackle box and started hitting his fishing pole. The vibrations traveled along the taut fishing line, rousing the cat into another burst of swimming. Groves’ hands were already bloody from trying to stop his reel. His line was quickly running out. Finally, the fish stopped fighting, and at 8:20 p.m., Groves pulled his state record 94-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish ashore.

Rasmussen remembers seeing the big blue mounted above the fireplace in Groves’ home, right next to the Shakespeare rod and reel he’d used to land it. In fact, when Shakespeare heard about Groves’ record-setting catch, they supplied him with new equipment for several years.”The fish was a big part of his life,” Rasmussen says.”He wasn’t a boastful guy, but whenever he would talk to the kids and grandkids, he’d talk a lot about how proud he was. People used to follow him around. He’d have to sneak out to go fishing because they would all try to get into his spots.”

Catching one monster catfish would have been enough to secure his angling legacy, but the blue was actually the second record cat he’d caught that week. Four days earlier, and about 200 yards farther downstream on the James, he landed the channel catfish that eventually became the subject of intense scrutiny within the South Dakota fishing world.

For 70 years, fishermen, biologists, ichthyologists and anyone else intensely interested in catfishing looked at the old black and white photos of Groves standing alongside his champion channel, examined the fin structure and wondered if it wasn’t really a blue catfish.”It was always presumed to be a channel cat,” Rasmussen says,”and there are channel catfish that have been caught since that time in other states that have been bigger.” (The current world record is a 58-pound channel taken from a reservoir in South Carolina in 1964, though there are questions about that fish, too, since the largest channel catfish generally weigh in at 30 pounds or a little more.)

ìI think for many people in South Dakota, the real question was, ëHow does a channel cat get to be more than 35 pounds?'” Rasmussen says.”The nature of them is to be a smaller fish. But when you look at the type of fins, the tail fins on a channel cat are a little bit sharper and the fin near the tail is squared off. They say very clearly that it’s not the color of the catfish that makes that determination, but I think at that time they didn’t know better.”

Geno Adams began hearing the questions when he took an administrative position with Game, Fish and Parks in 2009.”Ever since then I’ve gotten emails or calls asking why we wouldn’t turn over that state record because everyone knew that it was not identified correctly,” Adams says.

He shared the photos with fisheries experts at South Dakota State University and other ichthyologists around the country. Their opinions were overwhelming.”It was resounding,” he says.”It didn’t take people long to look at it. They could tell by the anal fin that it was not a channel catfish. When 100 percent of the people are instantly saying it’s not a channel cat, it’s time to do something. I wanted to do this for channel catfishing and channel cat fishermen. It’s a pretty cool thing to have a state record, and to have this category be inactive forever because of a misidentification didn’t seem just.”

Game, Fish and Parks announced in May of 2019 that the channel catfish record would be voided, almost 70 years to the day since Groves pulled his trophy out of the James River. Rasmussen and other family members were initially upset, but given nearly a year to examine the evidence themselves, they’ve come to agree with the decision.”This is not taking away from Roy’s prowess as a cat fisherman,” Adams says.”He was a legitimate catfishing expert, probably one of the best cat fishermen of all time in South Dakota. He was like the godfather of catfishing in South Dakota, and we did not want to take anything away from him or the family.”

The announcement coincided with the launch of Catrush 2019, a campaign designed to generate interest in catfishing. With a new state record up for grabs, anglers responded. On May 20, just three days after the record was voided, the new benchmark was set when Chuck Ewald caught an 8-pound, 3-ounce channel cat at Whitlock Bay. His record lasted only two days. It fell another six times by June 10. Drew Matthews holds the current state record with a 30-pound, 1-ounce channel caught in a farm pond by Murdo.

Though voiding Groves’ long-held record was a difficult decision, perhaps he would have been happy to see fishermen taking the same joy that he did in chasing the elusive cats.”We knew it wouldn’t be the easiest thing or the most well received by those who are involved in that record, but we also knew that the vast majority of people out there were going to be happy with the decision, and that’s the way it’s turned out,” Adams says.”I heard countless stories of people going catfishing who hadn’t gone in 20 years, or they’d never gone before, and they decided they wanted to go try to catch a state record channel cat. From that aspect it was a success in highlighting channel cat fishing in South Dakota.”

Even Rasmussen has gotten in on the fun. He and his wife live along Lake Oahe, where they enjoy fishing for walleye, northerns and catfish, but nothing like the behemoths that his great-grandfather caught. His biggest is a 12-pound channel.”That’s enough of a thrill for an old man like me,” he says.

Still, monstrous fish lurk in the murky waters of South Dakota’s rivers, waiting for someone with the right combination of skill, time, patience and stamina to land them.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Wild Horses in Winter

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: The Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary is no longer open to visitors. This story is revised from the January/February 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

The mustangs of Fall River County wander steep cliffs that descend to the Cheyenne River Valley, the highlands of Hell Canyon and other Black Hills geological wonders.

We arrived at the Wild Horse Sanctuary on a cold and sunny winter afternoon. The mustangs, shaggy with winter hair, didn’t even glance up as we drove down a good gravel road toward what looks like many other West River ranches.

Two old houses and several modest barns sat at the end of the road. Wild turkeys were roosting on the hitch of an old horse-drawn wagon and deer — several with massive antlers — grazed near some haystacks. A smattering of snow lay around the corrals; deeper drifts could be seen in the hills above.

An aura of peacefulness blankets many South Dakota farms and ranches, especially in winter when the pace slows for man and beast. Still, you’ll find few places with more tranquility than this spacious, 14,000-acre sanctuary in Fall River County, a 10-minute drive south of Hot Springs on Highway 71.

Writer and naturalist Dayton Hyde founded the sanctuary in 1988 and helped to oversee its operations until his death in December 2018, but its wild mustangs have always been the stars. They are descendants from horses brought to Mexico and Central America 500 years ago by Spanish explorers. Despite their southern roots, they’ve acclimated well to the northern plains.”If you took them from California in the winter they might not be ready,” Hyde told us,”but if they come in the summer they’ll grow hair in the fall. They also know instinctively to maintain a closeness to the other horses; they’ll bunch up and warm each other. It’s the way they battle the flies in the summer and the snow and cold of winter.”

“The horses seem to like winter better than the heat of summer,” adds Susan Watt, executive director of the sanctuary for the past 20 years. But too much confinement makes them uncomfortable.”If someone wants to keep them in a barn, they’ll think, ‘oh no, that’s not what I like to do.'”

The horses do appreciate some human intervention.”We park the tour busses near the corrals so they break the north wind, and the horses don’t seem to mind that,” says Watt.

A full belly is the best defense against a South Dakota winter, and once again the humans of the sanctuary play a hand; they feed a half million dollars worth of hay every winter, along with a molasses supplement called”cake.”

Sanctuary staff have names like Painted Lady, Medicine Hattie and Magnificent Mary, for many of the wild mares. The horses may nick and bite one another to establish herd hierarchy.

As the sun disappeared behind the Cheyenne River bluffs, we retired to a cabin. After dark, it’s eerily quiet. You might hear a coyote’s howl, or the hoot of an owl. Walk outdoors, and you’ll believe those astronomers who speculate that there may be 100 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy; their brightness illuminates the sky, the chalky river bluffs and the snow-covered grassland.

Horses corralled near the sanctuary headquarters were already feeling frisky as the sun showed itself in the morning. Perhaps they were anticipating the molasses cake; some were frolicking, nipping at one another’s necks, establishing their pecking order. Their steaming breath floated in the 10-degree air.

A sanctuary staffer offered to give us a pickup tour. We rattled across frozen ruts and rocks, heading for high ground. Elevation at the sanctuary headquarters is 3,500 feet; we reached an overlook that measures 4,500 feet.

There the snow was a foot high in spots, deeper yet in the ravines, and the ponderosa pine forest was a glistening winter wonderland. Mule deer with racks like Santa’s reindeer grazed on winter grasses in the meadows. A coyote sauntered ahead of us.

As we neared several small herds of wild horses, we parked the pickup. Soon we were surrounded by a dozen or more of the most curious. The mustangs can be jealous and may even bite with their big teeth. Our guide says they never nicked a visitor, though she was once lightly bitten on the thigh. The safest place to stand is along the shoulder or flank.

On summer outings, the guide carries a stick and a bucket in the truck box in case she spots a rattlesnake. That’s not a worry in winter –flies or snakes are nowhere to be found.

This land marks the convergence of the great northern prairie and the deciduous Black Hills ponderosa pine forest, so the views are unique to the world. Pelicans fish on the Cheyenne River, which twists through the very heart of the sanctuary. Cascade Creek, fed by the ever-warm spring waters that gave name to the nearby city of Hot Springs, steams on a winter’s day. In summer, sunbathers and swimmers congregate at Cascade Falls, a historic swimming hole just north of the sanctuary along Highway 71. In winter, the little falls — bordered by foliage frosted from the mist — are an ethereal sight.

We drove past a Sun Dance lodge where Lakota men and women gather in the summers for vision quests, sun dances and other spiritual and cultural activities. In winter, cedar branches that shade the Native Americans in July are now brown and dry. Buffalo skulls, bleached as white as the snow, are lined on a slope. Hyde welcomed the sun dancers 20 years ago and they have been coming back ever since.

The sanctuary also includes ancient Lakota hunting grounds where people came to collect medicinal plants and herbs along the river. Hell Canyon, Wildcat Canyon and a dozen other scenic and historic crevices spill out of the southern Black Hills onto the rough hill country.

The sanctuary staff know the names of the families who homesteaded there, and even the history of the roads that pass through the five-square-mile sanctuary. Yes, roads have histories here. They’re not taken for granted. Ranchers depend on roads that cross each others’ pastures for access to the main roads.

Fences also have histories, even gates; an automatic gate was installed to ease the aging Hyde’s comings and goings. Unfortunately, the mustangs quickly figured it out. They learned that if enough of them stand and squeeze against it, that it will open. Basically, they know they have to simulate a vehicle.

Even in winter snow, yucca, prickly pear cactus, buffalo grass and other vegetation peeks through on the windswept hilltops. As we returned to the ranch headquarters, we noticed a newer variety of plant — a tidy vineyard of Concord grapes, now dormant and leafless.

Quiet and solitude are year-round virtues of the sanctuary. Winter simply adds an extra hush.

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The Winter Deer Hunt

By John Andrews

Deer are the most popular big game species hunted in South Dakota. The state earns nearly $4.8 million annually in license revenue. Photo by Jesse Brown Nelson.

We arrived just before the sun crested the eastern horizon. A small propane heater buzzed in the corner of the 4-by-8-foot shack, softening the bite of a 29-degree late November morning.

Our eyes strained through cloudy windows into the thick shelterbelt, watching for any movement. A hen pheasant clucked furiously somewhere inside the tangle of cottonwoods. A squirrel pounced back and forth between tiny branches that barely held his weight.

Our silent vigil was aided by 6 inches of snow that had fallen the week before. The draws and valleys, normally a monotone late autumn brown, were filled with white, making the deer we sought even more visible.

Deer are by far the most popular big game species hunted in South Dakota. Deer license sales, on average, are about three times greater than all other big game licenses, and generate $4.8 million annually in license fee revenue. In 2015, about 61,000 South Dakotans (7.5 percent of the population) and another 6,850 non-residents hunted deer in the state.

For many families, the winter deer hunt is a long held and cherished tradition. That’s what brought us to this deer blind on a farmstead north of Henry, in the far western edge of Codington County — to pass that tradition along to my son Joe, a newly licensed 12-year-old, experiencing his first hunt.

The hunt was a lesson in patience. Not a single deer appeared in the first hour of daylight, although we knew this stand of trees was a favored spot. Just three days earlier, a fine 4-by-4 had been harvested from this very shelterbelt. And two weeks earlier we watched two trophy bucks chase several does up the ridge on the far side of the trees. One of them stopped, alerted by the faintest of sounds coming from our hiding spot, and stared in our direction for what seemed an eternity.

As the sun finally peeked over the tops of low-lying clouds to our backs, the gnarled cottonwoods were bathed in golden light. Stubble in the field off to the south began to lose its coat of frost. A thin layer of fog formed over a small pond just beyond the trees, and slowly burned away as the sun rose higher into the sky. But no deer. More than once, Joe’s attention turned to his iPhone and a rousing game of Brain Dots to stem the boredom.

Just before 9 a.m., we saw three does trotting south to north through the trees. My young hunter quietly opened the hinged window and rested the barrel of his rifle on the ledge.”Shoot the last one,” our guide whispered. Nervous anticipation filled the shack. He had done well shooting at targets in the farmyard, but what would happen now that an actual deer stood in his crosshairs? For some hunters, this is the moment they learn that they simply can’t pull the trigger, despite the desire and preparation.

A shot rang out — but not from us. A hunter somewhere to our south had spied his own prize. The deer froze for an instant, and then ran north into thicker trees. The opportunity was lost.

Once again, we waited. Two young bucks wandered into a clearing from the east, but since Joe’s tag allowed only the harvest of one antlerless deer we watched as they jumped the barbed wire fence with ease and trotted into the trees.

At 9:40, we called it a morning, much to Joe’s disappointment. Deer are most active in the hours immediately around dawn and dusk, bedding down for much of the bright daylight hours. Later, we would have another chance.

Joe Andrews, a newly-licensed 12-year-old, discovered that the winter deer hunt can be a lesson in patience as he waited in the deer shack west of Watertown with uncle Eric Johnson.

The first written record of deer hunting by European explorers came in 1804, when Meriwether Lewis killed two mule deer at the mouth of the White River. Deer were abundant when homesteaders began flooding into Dakota Territory in the 1860s, which meant they were a steady food source for families eking out a sparse existence on the frontier. Deer numbers dropped so drastically that in 1883 the territorial legislature banned hunting from Jan. 1 to Sept. 1, hoping to help herds recover.

The animals rebounded, but slowly. More stringent legislation in the early 1900s and creation of the state Game, Fish and Parks Department in 1909 aided deer populations. A structured deer season was reintroduced in 1929, when 2,000 residents were given licenses to hunt in the Black Hills. An East River season was added in 1947, followed by a West River Prairie season in 1952. Deer hunting in South Dakota reached record levels in 2010, when 81,478 hunters purchased 128,250 licenses to hunt deer, resulting in a harvest of 95,000 animals. Today South Dakota offers separate seasons for archery, muzzleloaders and youth, among others, all under the watchful eye of Game, Fish and Parks, the agency tasked with ensuring South Dakota’s deer herds remain healthy and plentiful. At last count, 426,000 whitetails and 116,500 mule deer roamed the state.

We returned at 4:10 p.m., with 41 minutes of daylight left and 71 minutes to hunt. It was 46 degrees; no need for the heater. Now, as we faced west, we stared into the brightly setting sun. There wasn’t a breath of wind. A squirrel — maybe the same one we saw just hours earlier — leapt from thin branch to thin branch, evoking a sense of dÈj‡ vu.

But this wasn’t a repeat of our morning in the blind. After barely more than 30 minutes, three deer ambled along the fence line. Again, the window quietly opened. We watched as they nosed through the undergrowth, pausing every now and then to sniff the air and listen for sounds that didn’t belong.

Joe trained his attention on the large deer in the rear, waiting for it to emerge from the brush. Silence filled the blind. The deer stepped forward and raised its head.

The loud crack of his rifle shot reverberated throughout the small confines of the shack. Two deer turned and ran, while the third reared up on its back legs. It cleared the barbed wire, stumbled and fell no more than 20 feet into the clearing. It was 4:51. Sunset.

Another November is now upon us; talk of returning to the blind has permeated suppertime conversations for several weeks. Joe was lucky enough to secure an East River buck tag for 2019, in addition to his youth tag. His trophy buck roams this very morning somewhere in the trees of Codington County. Soon, we’ll be back for another season among the squirrels, pheasants and the chill of a late autumn day.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Park of Peace

By Paul Higbee

Trinity Eco Prayer Park features species native to the Black Hills and surrounding area.

Rapid City has 1,650 acres of parks, ranging from a long and wide swath of green along Rapid Creek to steep inclines up craggy Cowboy Hill (where a big”M” represents the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology campus) and specialty parks like Storybook Island and Dinosaur Park.

Every park has a story. Works Progress Administration laborers fashioned the dinosaurs from cement in the 1930s, and today the big reptiles oddly symbolize Rapid City like nothing else. The 1972 flood that killed 238 people led to development of the creekside greenway, representing both a memorial and a”never again” pledge to keep the floodplain free from residential construction. The”M” park (officially Hanson-Larsen Memorial) is a bit of wilderness in the midst of a city of 70,000, and features some 12 miles of hiking and biking trails with views of Black Elk Peak and the Needles.

Paddleboaters lazily float the waters of Canyon Lake Park, and Memorial Park near the Civic Center has a Veterans Memorial and a piece of the actual Berlin Wall. Sioux Park on the city’s west side is known for the William Noordermeer Formal Gardens while Wilson Park, a tiny greenspace in the West Boulevard Historic District, has formal gardens that were created as Japanese Gardens but modified after war was declared in 1941.

Such a rich and daunting history of parks didn’t deter Ken Steinken and his friends from undertaking a new project that embraces modern-day values of environmental sustainability and a livable downtown. The park, affiliated with Trinity Lutheran Church, isn’t city property but it welcomes the public — and city parks staff have been helpful in its development.

“There’s a sense of community here, and an interest in park-building within that community,” says Rapid City Parks and Recreation landscape designer Alex DeSmidt.”The Parks Department has such a wide focus, but groups come along that are focused on just one thing, like sports or in this case sustainability. Their work expands the park system even though they’re not under the jurisdiction of the city.”

Steinken knows there’s a lot more to park building than mowing a vacant lot and hanging out a welcome sign. There is hydrology to study, more than 100 plant species to consider, turf to haul and, of course, dollars to raise.

Trinity Eco Prayer Park occupies more than half an acre on St. Joseph Street, just east of Fifth Street. On the first day the mercury hit 70 in 2017, a handful of robins hopped across the grass, joggers and cyclists passed through, and a man reading a novel found a bench and stayed an hour. The park is, as a brochure promised,”a peaceful urban setting.”

Some Rapid Citians remember Ken Steinken as their former English teacher at Stevens High School. He is also a driving force behind the creation of the downtown park.

Toward evening the skyline isn’t defined by a sunset silhouetting the Black Hills, but by the glow of big, classic neon signs on the nearby Hotel Alex Johnson and the South Dakota Stockgrowers’ building. Rather than scents of ponderosa pine or creekside vegetation, aromas of burgers and fries waft into the park from a Hardee’s next door. The spot feels like an extension of the neighborhood — an eclectic mix of buildings that include Trinity, single-story specialty shops, Racing Magpie gallery and studios, coffee shops, a dance studio, the Pennington County Courthouse, the Stockgrowers headquarters, and beautifully repurposed brick automotive sales and service structures. One such building, directly across the street from the park, is now a collaborative co-working space called The Garage that houses small businesses and nonprofits. Another, two minutes away by foot, is the new Black Hills bureau for South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

All of this, it’s important to stress, sits”east of Fifth.” For several years Rapid City has won acclaim for revitalizing its downtown, refurbishing historic buildings, attracting both retail and residents, and filling Main Street Square with year-round activity. But most of the rejuvenation happened west of high-traffic Fifth Street, and has only recently spread east of Fifth.

For a while it looked like the neighborhood’s redevelopment would be dominated by a 10-story combination retail/office tower, proposed for the very site where the park now lies. Members of Trinity Lutheran Church were concerned when they discovered that their church stood in the shadow of the tower. When the project stalled, they used a separate, long-established foundation to buy the land in 2005.

“We didn’t have any plans for the property,” recalls Steinken, a church member.”The foundation sprayed to keep weeds down. In fact, for two or three years after the spraying stopped, nothing grew.”

And so the half-acre lot sat bare, as far from park-like as imaginable. Churches can always use more parking, but there seemed to be an understanding that laying concrete would smother discussion of other possibilities. Once pavement goes down, it usually stays.

Gradually the idea of a public park emerged.”That put us on a kind of tightrope,” recalls Steinken.”The foundation that bought and still owns the property had gathered money over the years for benefitting the church.” While a park next door would certainly benefit Trinity, it would also welcome the wider community and, in fact, people unassociated with Trinity would vastly outnumber church-goers.

Pastor Wilbur Holz wasn’t surprised that his congregation thought that was fine.”A strong value this church has held for many years is its belief that that what God has given us should be used to bless others,” he says.”I think that describes the park.”

Even with that positive outlook, few could have guessed how quickly and seamlessly the park would fit as part of the neighborhood’s fabric.

Rapid City has a transient population. Inevitably the question was raised: Would homeless men and women stake out the park, sleep there and make it undesirable for parents and their kids? It hasn’t been a problem, partly because of the park’s open physical design, but also because of Trinity’s longtime relationship with the transient population. Members feed them (9,000 meals in 2016, reports Pastor Holz) and use that opportunity to form friendships.

Native plants and creative space have drawn people of all ages to the park.

“When you’ve worked with people and established a level of trust, they respect that,” Steinken says.”The park feels like an extension of the church to them.”

The park would also demonstrate good stewardship of the earth, a concept that intrigued Steinken and pulled him deeply into the project. He became the coordinator and, after ground was broken in 2014, found himself working with designers and builders and making hard decisions.”It was a weird situation,” he recalls,”because all I had was a little sourcebook about sustainable landscape construction. I’d ask myself, ‘Who am I to be doing this?'”

Describing Ken Steinken isn’t easy. He’s probably best known in Rapid City as a former Stevens High School English teacher (for two decades), but he’s also an author and former Rapid City Journal writer, works at the airport and has served as a ranger at Jewel Cave National Monument. It was there he noticed how many people love nature yet don’t really understand it, and that efforts to preserve nature sometimes keep the public at a distance.

Steinken and his wife, Penny, arrived in Rapid City in 1976. He came from suburban Chicago and she from the Boston area. Black Hills nature gripped them in ways that even the considerable charms of the Great Lakes and New England could not, and they built a good Rapid City life, raising two sons and a daughter. After retiring from teaching, Steinken found himself in the middle of the park project with its $440,000 price tag. Given his writing background it’s not surprising that Steinken can produce top-drawer press releases. He wrote one in November of 2011 and called a press conference announcing the park. Days later an anonymous contribution for $100,000 arrived.”The donor wrote a check, put it in an envelope, and just dropped it in the regular mail,” he remembers.

The team of church volunteers who came forward to help proved as valuable as the cash. Steinken found he could make calls and get friendly advice from the city Parks and Recreation Department, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“NRCS helped us with a plant species list, and information about how to plant those species,” Steinken says. Volunteers agreed the park wouldn’t be defined by Kentucky bluegrass. It would celebrate West River plant life, divided into four sections: Black Hills (switchgrass), shortgrass prairie (buffalo grass and grama), midgrass prairie (knee-high bluestem) and wetlands (prairie cordgrass).

“One of my advisors warned me that going that way would make it challenging to tell volunteers to go pull weeds,” Steinken says.”They have to know what’s supposed to be there.”

Cactus, it turns out, is supposed to be there. An area rancher offered buffalo grass from his pasture if volunteers came and carved out the sod. It was hard work, of course.”But in doing it that way, we got some cactus in the turf, too,” Steinken says.

Among the park’s signature concepts is modeling storm water gardening, drawing rainwater in rather than diverting it out, as urban development typically does. That form of gardening utilizes water naturally, prevents water pollution that occurs when the resource moves down street gutters, and lessens problem runoff during heavy rains. Steinken and his team thought long and hard about recommendations to install an irrigation sprinkler system, but eventually did. In 2015 plants were put in and the next year a water main broke, knocking the sprinklers out of commission for a long period in summer. The plant life did fine.

Modeling solar energy is another important mission. Solar-generated light illuminates the park after dark and solar collector panels provide power for some park maintenance, including charging a cordless weed-whacker. A big test will come this summer when volunteers hope to see a cordless electric mower operate on electricity generated in the park. The project’s Black Hills Energy bill is impressively low each month, and surplus electricity generated is sold back to the utility.

Trinity Eco Prayer Park opened in June of 2016. By that point it had already won a sustainability award from Rapid City. Summer barbecues draw hundreds, with music performed in a shelter on the park’s south end. There are also quiet times of prayer and reflection.

Steinken thinks the myriad activities in this little half acre all point to similar questions:”How do we relate to the planet? How do we relate to one another? It’s very much the same thing.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Prospecting in the Hills

By Rich Jensen

Gary Mallams and fellow miners welcome opportunities to introduce youth to the adventure and intrigue of prospecting.

“We never sell the gold,” Kathleen Flanagan, secretary of the Black Hills Prospecting Club, tells me over lunch in Rapid City.”It’s the first question everyone asks.”

This doesn’t make much sense to me. Why else would someone go out panning for gold?

And then the members of the club bring out their favorite nuggets. Almost all of them have brought their best finds to lunch. Most are kept in small vials filled with water or mineral oil.

As I rotate the vials, nuggets and flakes roll around, catching light as only gold does, and these prospectors’ reluctance to sell their gold suddenly seems reasonable. Money all looks the same. Sell a gold nugget and you’re trading something unique for plain old folding money, and eventually whatever ordinary goods that money can buy.

People used gold for decoration long before they used it for money, and if you’ve seen unprocessed gold sparkle, a little bit of that fascination probably rubbed off on you.

For many club members, their love affair with gold started at an early age. Lou Schmeltzer, one of the older members of the club, can still remember the day 80 or so years ago when one of his father’s friends brought white quartz crystals embedded with gold into his father’s barber shop in Lead, along with pieces of schist that had free gold between the layers. He still has some of those pieces of schist.

By age 9, Schmeltzer was sneaking off into the abandoned mines around Lead, looking for gold with a candle in his hand. Later, equipped with one of his mom’s pie pans, he set about panning for gold wherever he found a ledge, or outcrop, of mineralized rock that might have deposited gold into a streambed as it slowly eroded. Finally he got an authentic prospector’s pan — a banner day indeed.

The process of panning for gold hasn’t changed much since the Deadwood gold rush of 1876. Prospectors start with placer deposits, which are basically old streambeds. They’re a mix of loose soil and gravel that eroded from the Black Hills eons ago and washed down into valleys, where it remains.

Deadman Gulch, buried deep in the Black Hills near Rockerville, is a popular claim site for Don Hamm and fellow members of the Black Hills Prospecting Club. The gulch was named for two miners who died there in 1876.

A prospector starts with a pan full of water and placer material dug from a nearby deposit or scooped from the streambed itself. By carefully swirling the water around and allowing it to spill out of the pan, loose soil and lighter rocks are washed away, leaving the densest minerals, often a dark gray to black mass. If there’s any”color” in there (yes, prospectors still call it that), it will appear right along the curve. Sam Griner, a veteran prospector, calls it”a big smile at the bottom of the pan.”

Panning equipment has been upgraded slightly, even if the process is little changed. Rather than sturdy metal pans, today’s prospectors often prefer pans made of soft rubber that can be twisted and bent to better control the water swishing around the bottom. Pans are usually dark in color to make it easier to see small flecks of gold.

Some prospectors also use a sluice box, a long trough that has various ridges that catch rocks and minerals as water runs through it. The principle is basically the same as panning — gold is heavier than almost any other rock or mineral likely to turn up in a placer deposit, and it will settle to the bottom of the sluice box, while the water washes loose soil and lighter gravel away.

Although prospectors are looking for gold, it’s not unusual for other minerals to show up at the bottom of the pan. The Black Hills have a little of everything, including gems and metals. Don Hamm, the club’s vice president, once found a small platinum nugget while panning, and several other prospectors have found tourmaline and gem quality garnets. In fact, the January birthstone is so plentiful in the Hills that one of the club’s claims is called the Garnet.

The suspense of panning, of not knowing what you’re going to find, is part of what makes it an enjoyable hobby.”It’s all about the hunt,” according to Dean Duncan,”and the sense of satisfaction in finding the first piece of the day.”

“You can learn a lot of patience and a lot of frustration,” says Sam Griner.”But it’s all fun,” he continues, because when some color does turn up,”you’re the first person to ever see that nugget of gold.”

Stewardship of the land is an important part of panning. Prospectors during the gold rush weren’t so concerned about leaving a claim in better condition than they found it, but it’s a point of pride for many members of the club. If prospectors dig a hole in a placer deposit, they’re expected to backfill the hole and seed it with grass when they’re done. If they excavate loose deposits from a hillside, they’re expected to knock down the overburden, meaning to collapse the hillside over the excavation instead of leaving holes in the hill.

Club president Gary Mallams says, “finding gold in your pan is just one of the rewards for being in a beautiful place with good friends.”

Panning on National Forest land still occurs on claims, and while a few members of the Black Hills Prospecting Club also work their own claims, most of them work on one of five claims that the club maintains. Two are along French Creek, where members of George Custer’s expedition discovered gold in 1874.

Don Hamm works his own claim. He and his father, Bob, the oldest member of the club at 92, may be the most experienced prospectors. In 1982, they incorporated themselves as”Southern Hills Mining” and had the third largest gold mining operation in South Dakota that year. They pulled about 50 ounces of gold out of a placer deposit from one of Don’s secret spots.

The land under most claims remains the property of the federal government. Prospectors are free to take the gold they find, but they don’t have any other ownership stake in the land. However, some claims are”patented,” meaning that the claim belongs to the claimholder. He can build a mine — or even a house — on the land. Lots of private property in the Hills started out as patented claims.

Don Hamm lives on a patented claim along Deadman’s Creek. That inspired his grandkids to try prospecting.”You dig in the dirt and you can usually find gold,” he says.”It’s fun to teach the kids how to pan — once they find gold, they’re hooked.”

Kathleen Flanagan’s daughter, Kristin Draine, and her husband Chris are also active in the Prospecting Club. Like most members, they have a stock of nuggets found while panning.

However, they have an additional reason for being involved.”It’s something we want for our kids,” Kris says,”to be out in nature and active, not always inside.” Of course, many youth are skeptical at first. Venturing into the Hills to slosh water and dirt around in a rubber plate may not sound like fun. But many kids change their minds when they start finding gold.”Are we going prospecting this weekend?” is now a common question in the Draine household.

There’s also a social aspect to prospecting. Membership in the Black Hills Prospecting Club is just over 250 from several states, and they have regular monthly meetings and organized outings and contests. The current record holder in their panning contest is a man from Keystone who sifted through a pan in only 12.5 seconds.

Dean Duncan talks about the enjoyment of being out with friends, and”showing the greenhorns how to pan and some of the shortcuts and tricks.”

Club president Gary Mallams agrees. He discovered prospecting on a trip to Alaska, and while he enjoys the search as much as anyone in the club,”finding gold in your pan is just one of the rewards for being in a beautiful place with good friends.”

It doesn’t hurt that the prospecting takes place in the Black Hills. For many, the scenery is worth the trip, even when the prospecting doesn’t go their way. Larry Howells moved into the Hills from Kansas. He thought that panning would be an”easy, fun hobby with some financial return.”

Veteran prospectors say the gold flakes they find are, “a big smile at the bottom of the pan.”

It didn’t work out that way.”I soon found out that carrying a pick and shovel, packing buckets of rock and dirt, standing in cold water, and swirling several pounds of mud and gravel in a pan is not easy.” Regarding the financial return, he says,”Don’t quit your day job.”

But he’s still an active member.”Fun comes from being out in some of the most breathtaking scenery and the sounds of nature.”

“I’d heard of the Hills,” says Bill Dore.”I was working out in the eastern Montana oil fields in the early ’80s, in the summer heat, just baking, and I used to dream about going up some creek with a pan — and who knows what I’d find? I just wanted to be out in the shade. That’s a lot better than the Montana oil fields.”

There’s great value in prospecting deep in the Black Hills, but these days it has little to do with the price of gold.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Sailing by Balloon

By Jerry Wilson

Balloonists at the Great Plains Balloon Race in Sioux Falls. Photo by Greg Latza.

The summer solstice sun rose above Beaver Creek as Kay West and her crew rolled out a red and yellow ribbon of rip-stop nylon that, once inflated, would lift her and three passengers above lingering pockets of fog and carry us north on a gentle morning breeze.”Most pilots don’t have to assemble their aircraft before they fly,” she jokes. She dragged a fan to the serpent’s mouth and fired up the generator. Little by little the fabric rose, assuming the elongated egg shape of a hot air balloon.

Still yawning from a 4 a.m. wake-up, I waited in the parking lot of Beaver Creek Nature Area southeast of Brandon with passengers Jessica Hudson and Justin Kuipers of Brandon. For years I had gazed up in envy as balloonists floated silently overhead, sometimes unaware of their presence until the blaze of propane caught my ear. I once drove the chase vehicle for friends in flight. Finally, it was my turn to ride.

West had checked her contacts at the National Weather Service and FAA Flight Service, who predicted a southeast breeze on the surface, with a westerly shift atop the temperature inversion, the calmer surface air. Our trajectory should roughly follow a course northward, toward Garretson and the Palisades; by changing elevation, the pilot could steer slightly east or west.

A few blasts from the propane burner and the balloon stood erect, its smiling face toward the sky.”All my balloons have faces,” West says.”This one I call Sunny-Side-Up.” The crew anchored the gondola as West climbed in to take the controls, followed by Jessica, Justin and me. Another bellow from the burner heated the balloon’s interior — and our shoulders — and we lifted off. In moments the ground crew grew small. They climbed into the chase vehicle, a radio-equipped pickup truck, and began pursuit.

We soared to a quarter mile high, then floated in silence between the Beaver Creek Lutheran Church and Justin’s parents’ rural Brandon home. So far the ride was everything I had imagined. But suddenly it became more.

Justin dropped to one knee in the crowded basket and took Jessica’s hands.”Jessica,” he said,”we’ve had some pretty good times for a couple of years. I wonder if you’d spend the rest of your life with me.” He slipped a gleaming stone on her finger. West and I studied the cornfield passing below, giving the newly engaged couple a moment of what had to pass for privacy in the confines of a 3-by-4-foot wicker basket.

Our writer’s traveling companions, Justin Kuipers and Jessica Hudson, became engaged during the flight.

A second first for me. The only other wedding proposal I’ve been privy to issued from my own lips 34 years ago, and I’m not sure what I said. For West, it was the second engagement flight of the week. The earlier marriage proposal came when a creative suitor floated with his prospective fiancÈe over Tuthill Park in Sioux Falls. Seventy-eight friends he’d bussed in for the occasion lay on the grass below, spelling out”Marry Me Amy.”

Our happy couple again became a part of the foursome as Interstate 90 came into view. Justin produced a cell phone and called his parents.”Look out your window,” he said.”You’ll see us sailing by.”

Kay West is no stranger to ballooning. She’s been flying for two decades, ever since as a single parent in California she started crewing for something fun and free to do on weekends. Sixteen years ago she married Mark West, now president of Aerostar International in Sioux Falls, the subsidiary of Raven Industries that until recently was the worldwide leader in building hot air balloons.”I didn’t come to Sioux Falls willingly,” she says.”Now you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming back to California.”

In 1994 Kay’s hobby became a business, when she founded Prairie Sky, one of two commercial ballooning operations in Sioux Falls. One of her balloons carries just two; Sunny-Side-Up has room for four. An hour-long flight consumes 12 to 14 gallons of propane in summer, less in winter, when less heat is required to lift the craft into colder skies. West takes about 100 people on commercial flights each year, and also provides flight instruction.

But this was no time for talking history, or the finer points of hot air flight. It was time to watch technique in action, and to appreciate the ride. Past the interstate, West pulled the cord that opens a vent in the balloon’s top; we dipped and skimmed across a cornfield in what she called”contour flying;” the altimeter read 20 feet.

At this elevation we caught the southeast breeze that carried us on a trajectory directly in line with Jessica’s parents’ home. As we approached, we ascended just enough to clear the mature ash trees that surround the two-story farmhouse, and yes, there was Jessica’s mother, waving in the front yard.

“She said ‘yes!'” Justin yells.

Jessica’s mother heard the news as the balloon flew over her house.

“Congratulations!” comes the reply from the ground.

As we neared Palisades State Park, we drifted across a broad expanse of native prairie. We cruised over a coyote’s den. Pheasants cackled and flew from their overnight roosts. A magnificent buck glanced up as our shadow crossed.”That’s what I like most about flying,” West says,”the wildlife. You don’t see that from an airplane.” She is careful to avoid startling either wild animals or livestock.

We glided so low over a patch of cottonwoods south of the Garretson golf course that the pilot picked a leaf; she opened the top of the balloon again, and we dropped to skim the surface of a pond. Then she pulled a golf ball from a bag, hoping to score a hole-in-one. But the breeze had other ideas; we drifted past the green, and she saved the ball for another day.

West aimed for a grassy field behind the Nordstrom building on the south edge of Garretson, 11 miles from Beaver Creek. Three workers watched our descent and rushed over to hold the gondola as we climbed out.

“Be the first to congratulate the newly-engaged couple,” West says.

“That’s the way to do it,” a guy with”Tracy” stitched on his shirt tells Justin.”If she said ‘no,’ you could throw her out.”

Not likely.

Everybody helped to deflate and store the balloon. When it was tightly rolled, we stuffed it into its transport bag.”Now everybody turn your back to the bag and use your best assets,” West says. We sat in a circle on the edges and squeezed out remaining air.

Back at Beaver Creek, West offers the traditional balloonist’s prayer and champagne toast:

The winds have welcomed you with softness

The sun has kissed you with its warm hands

You have flown so high and so well

That God has joined you in his laughter

And set you gently back

Into the loving arms of Mother Earth

Following a flight with a sip of bubbly wine has been customary since Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier’s first hot air balloon flight in France in 1783. That experimental balloon was heated over a fire, and carried a sheep, a duck and a rooster for a low-altitude 2-mile cruise. When the balloon came down, frightened peasants came after it with pitchforks, so thenceforward the brothers carried a bottle of champagne as a peace offering to farmers on whose land they came down — or to consume should they be so fortunate as to land unobserved. Incidentally, the first man to fly the Montgolfier balloon was named Pilatre, from which we get”pilot.”

A farmstead near Brandon, as seen from 1,000 feet overhead.

West has flown at many events and places, including the Kentucky Derby, Germany, three South Dakota gubernatorial inaugurations and Devil’s Tower. But ask ballooners about their sport, and two cities come up. One is Albuquerque, New Mexico, where precision navigation is possible; the Sandia Mountains, in whose shadow Albuquerque lies, produce unusual air currents that make it possible to fly a broad circuit and land where you took off. Yet, in the history of ballooning, Sioux Falls is perhaps more important; it was in South Dakota that the sport of hot air ballooning really got off the ground.

South Dakota’s hot air balloon enthusiasts are a small club, including a dozen or so East River pilots in Sioux Falls, Irene, Yankton, Tyndall and Mitchell, and the state’s most active commercial pilot, Steve Bauer in Custer. The loose network maintains the South Dakota Balloon Association.

For eastern pilots, the event of the year is the Great Plains Hot Air Balloon Race in Sioux Falls. The key competition is the Hare and Hound Race. It’s not a race for speed, but for accuracy of navigation. The lead balloon, the”hare” takes off first, with the”hounds” in pursuit. The hare drops a cloth X; the hounds maneuver their balloons as close as possible and toss beanbags at the target.

Many consider Ed Yost, who co-founded Sioux Falls-based Raven Industries in 1956, as the father of modern ballooning. He died in 2007, but has not been forgotten thanks to his friend and fellow balloon enthusiast Russ Pohl.

A retired physicist and vice-president of Raven Industries who was first licensed as a balloon pilot in 1960, Pohl worked with Raven co-founder Yost on high altitude research projects for General Mills in the 1950s. Then the pair worked together at Raven to develop the hot air balloon for the Navy in the 1960s. Pohl served on the crew when Yost flew across the English Channel in 1963. Shortly thereafter, Yost almost completed the first balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean, but unfavorable winds drove him back from the European shore.

A stock pond near the Garretson golf course.

The modern hot air balloon evolved from a contract Raven received from the Office of Naval Research to build a reusable craft that could carry a man and payload to 10,000 feet and remain aloft for three hours. Yost first ascended from Bruning, Nebraska, in October 1960, in a propane-fueled envelope he had developed.

Over the years, Yost and Pohl experimented with gondolas made of plastic, fiberglass and aluminum, but finally concluded that the 18th-century French brothers had it right when they used wicker baskets. Their flexibility makes them safer and more comfortable in hard landings.

Besides Kay West, Sioux Falls’ other commercial pilot is Duane Waack, who calls his company Cloud Nine. Like West, he’s flown for 20 years and has been in business 16. He has also flown in Canada and Mexico, and over Mount Rushmore during the rededication ceremony in 1991.

Balloons are built to be functional, but they are beautiful as well; some are downright works of art. Wayne Hajek of Tyndall has two ordinary balloons, which he launches at various sites along the Missouri River. But he’s also part of Mitchell’s Corn Palace Balloon Club, which takes its specialty balloons to paying events around the country — balloons shaped like Uncle Sam, a lady with fruit on her head, Russian nesting dolls, the Marine Corps’ bulldog mascot and a witch on a broomstick.

Some balloon pilots fly on calm evenings, as well as mornings, taking off a couple hours before dark. But most avoid the volatile thermal activity that typically comes with hours of sunshine. Some, including commercial pilot Steve Bauer, fly only at sunrise. Bauer has flown passengers in the Black Hills since 1985.”A friend from Sioux Falls brought his balloon out and gave me my first ride, and I was hooked,” Bauer says.”It was kind of like sticking a needle in my arm. We’d land, and 10 cars would pull up and say ‘how can we get a ride?'” Thus, Black Hills Balloons was born.

Since then, Bauer, who grew up on a ranch near Wessington Springs, has flown all over the world. Re/Max officials hired him to fly their advertising balloon across the Caribbean to jump-start their real estate business. He’s flown in Central and South America, even over Europe’s Alps. Once he was flying for Ted Turner in Zimbabwe, and landed in a minefield. He helped Steve Fossett launch his balloon for the round-the-world flight in 2002.

“I’m an old boy now,” he says,”but in younger years I flew a lot of places where they said you couldn’t fly. That was all I needed to hear. Actually, the Black Hills is not the easiest place to fly. That’s why I don’t have a lot of competition.”

Bauer hosts a balloon rally in the Hills each year, the last weekend in July.”We have a nice get-together,” he says.”Albuquerque is all about money, but this is about flying and about getting old boys together.”

Bauer estimates there are perhaps 3,000 balloon pilots around the world.”But South Dakota had Raven,” he says,”so we probably have more pilots per capita than anywhere on Earth.”

“Most pilots don’t have to assemble their aircraft before they fly,” said our pilot. The same is true of the landing. Everybody pitches in to deflate the balloon and squeeze out the air. Most outings finish with a traditional toast and some bubbly.

In the Alps, Bauer piloted the richest of the rich, people who paid $14,000 for first-class accommodations and three days of flight. That’s a far cry from the style of Bauer’s Union County friend, pilot Kevin Kelly, for whom Bauer built an experimental balloon with $2,500 in nylon fabric, about a tenth the commercial cost of a comparable balloon.

Kelly and Bauer have flown together for years, not only in the Black Hills but also over Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean coast of Belize. But Kelly has only a private pilot license; he flies for sport, mostly over the hills and prairies of southeast South Dakota.

Kelly launches from neighbors’ pastures or harvested fields, and lands on county roads or whatever open places he can find.”The first rule of ballooning,” he says,”is never use power lines for brakes.” And neither does he carry champagne.”I find that a six-pack of Bud works better if you need to set your balloon down in somebody’s hayfield.”

Kelly says that he and Steve Bauer and the Black Hills gang have earned something of a”cowboy” reputation with some pilots, partly because Bauer’s summer rally lacks the strict rules of other balloon races. A rough landing once broke Kelly’s leg in three places, and another time he came down in a tree. But ballooning never loses its appeal for him.”It’s a perspective you don’t get any other way,” he says,”snuggled in a basket, drifting slowly.”

Vermillion artist Nancy Losacker, who has flown twice with Kelly, says the balloonist’s view of the textures and colors of corn and soybean fields changed her perception as a painter.”A hot air balloon is the only way I can see the world from the perspective of a bird,” she says.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Trial and Error at the Community Garden

By Rebecca Johnson

The Johnsons hone their gardening skills in Yankton’s community garden.

Our lawn is too shady to grow vegetables, so my husband and I sow our seeds in a community garden established on the west side of Yankton. Community gardening is fairly young in Yankton, but it has a long history, beginning in Detroit in the 1890s. The federal government promoted community gardens during World War I to supplement the food supply. Gardens fed the unemployed during the Depression, and the federal victory garden campaign during World War II encouraged patriotism and built morale. Interest dwindled after the war, then resurged in the 1970s. Community gardens have been growing ever since (pun intended).

South Dakota State University Extension agents coach groups interested in starting a community garden and there are several across our state, each one a little different than the next. Lead’s Mile High Community Garden, organized by NeighborWorks Dakota Home Resources, has 12 plots in an abandoned neighborhood near the edge of Homestake Mine. The Standing Rock Native Gardens Project hopes to prevent Type 2 diabetes by reclaiming traditional Lakota foods. And the Montrose and Murdo Horizons groups grow produce for those in need.

A committee promoting healthy lifestyles started Yankton’s garden. We joined the inaugural year, leasing two 12-by-18-foot plots for $20 each. Mark Hunhoff, a local machinery dealer, tills the soil at the start of the season and water is free — just bring your own hose. Each plot is marked with a plank painted with sayings like,”God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done,” or”You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.” My husband’s favorite is”I was determined to know beans.”

Jeremy and I started without horticultural skills, and we’re still not master gardeners, but we’ve learned a few tricks while digging in the dirt. For example, when planting leave more space between plants than you think you’ll need. And even if it seems wasteful, thin seedlings early and generously. Thinning and weeding is satisfying because of the tidy results, but if you squat for a long time you will get a serious head rush when you stand. Sit, kneel or bend over.

Once plants are in, you’ll become preoccupied with weather. Like farmers, I now start casual conversations with”Did it rain last night?” or”Have you heard if it’s supposed to storm?” I attribute this to my quest to”water evenly.”‚Ä® Zucchini and beets grow funny shapes and tomatoes get blossom end rot if you don’t. I wasn’t initially sure what”water evenly” meant. Apply water evenly to the ground? Don’t stand on one foot with the hose? My friend Tamme Klutman from Green 4 Ever in Sioux Falls explained it for me. Water every day when hot and dry. If it’s mild, water every other. About a gallon for most plants works best. Blossom end rot is caused by lack of calcium.”When the soil is too wet, the plant can’t absorb it and when the soil is too dry, the plant can’t absorb it, either,” Klutman says. So don’t over soak and don’t go bone dry in between.

After you get a watering rhythm, watch for bugs. Though Sneak Some Zucchini on Your Neighbor’s Porch Day implies otherwise, zucchini isn’t foolproof. My first attempt contracted vine borers. I performed surgery, slicing the base of the plant to dig out grubs, but the plant never fully recovered. Now I watch for moths fluttering around and eggs on stems and leaves. You can remove the parts of the plant with eggs. Organic pesticide helps, too.

And once mid-summer hits, always bring a bag or bucket to your plot. Even if you think nothing will be ready, your garden is likely to surprise you with a small harvest.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.